Easy Prey Read Free Page A

dress shirt, and a gold tennis bracelet.
    Kopp didn’t want to be in St. Paul, didn’t want to be in America. He wanted to be in Vienna, or Berlin, but he was condemned to this: to sell seventy-dollar male-look underpants, complete with front vent, to American women.
    Like a good German, he would do what was necessary to carry out his orders; but at the moment, he was still vibrating with the possibility of violence against the striking blonde who’d just walked off the barge. He knew her face. She’d been a model, he knew that, but she’d been out of it for a few years. She looked better now; she was stunning, he thought. . . .
    “What?” he asked. He’d missed what Plain said to him.
    “I’ve got your key shot. We move Clark around back and we put Alie’e dead center—Alie’e, come over here.” Alie’e walked toward them, along the plank, as Plain continued: “We light them separately and then jam them together with the long lens. Clark will look like the fuckin’ moon coming over the horizon, and Alie’e will be there in the foreground.”
    “We still need the nipple for the punch,” said the German. “We could lose it with a long lens.”
    “Gotta lose it anyway for the Americans,” said the creative director, a man with a red beard and a bald, freckled head.
    “We can do it both ways,” Plain said. “For the Europeans, we’ll hold it. We’ll stick a snoot over on the left and light it. Alie’e . . .” Alie’e stepped closer, and Plain slipped his fingers into the torn slit in the T-shirt and pulled it wider, to expose her nipple. “We’ll have to tape this back, we’ll have to bring it out a little more. Maybe touch it with a little more makeup.”
    “Not too much. She’s really pale, and too much would look artificial,” the art director said nervously.
    “Artificial would be all right,” Plain said. “What could be sexier than rouged nipples?”
    “In Germany, yes, I think,” Kopp said. “In America . . .”
    “Sexy in America, too, but it’d be too much for the mainline magazines,” Plain said. “For the American shot, we’ll ice her nipple to bring it up, so you can see it through the T-shirt, put a little shading on the side to emphasize it, but we re-layer the rip so there’s more coverage, and drop the snoot. But you’ll still be able to feel it there—there’ll be like a mental tit behind the T-shirt.”
    “You’re gonna ice me?” Alie’e asked. “You’re gonna fucking ice me? It’s twelve degrees in here.”
     
 
THE GERMAN HAD closed his eyes. After a moment, he nodded. Plain had worked for eight years in Miami, where he’d developed a reputation for a decadent, sexually charged fashion art, juxtaposing outlandishly disparate characters in variations of the Beauty and the Beast theme. Anyone could do that, and many tried, but Plain had something different, something that nobody else could quite get. Something straight out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Like this shot.
    The German could see it in his mind’s eye, now that all the characters were assembled in this ridiculous hulk, with the lights, the smell of the welder, the roaring propane heater . . . but never could have thought of it. This was why he traveled to Minneapolis and paid Plain as much as he did.
    Plain had vision.
     
 
THEY WORKED THE rest of the morning: hard work, done over and over. Plain had a color card in his brain, and a drama chip. He knew what he was getting, and he pushed it. Shredded the T-shirt, exposed one breast completely. Clark watched from the background, a burning torch in his hand, his cement-block sausage lover’s face fixed by the vision of the woman’s body. Lynn and Lil watched from behind the lights: “You don’t think that’s getting toward the porno . . . ?”
    When they were done, and while Jax was collecting her dressing bags, one of Plain’s assistants walked Alie’e back to a rented Lincoln Town Car. She recovered her purse and the stash of cocaine,